Isaac Week 2 - Second Life

KOTA (Korean Town District) Part Two

I had my first Second Life voicechat with someone who knew my new friend. By what I gathered from speaking with her, it seemed unlikely that anyone in this village was misrepresenting themselves (gender, age, etc). Everyone seemed to know each other rather well, putting to rest my initial fear of being trolled by one of those dreaded weirdos.

The next day, I spoke with the owner of the town. Apparently my friend told the owner a lot about me. "She is falling in love with Zak [me]", the owner said. I laughed. These kind of things are impossible in the real world, and yet, perhaps that's one of the appeals of second life - the anticipation that anything can happen.

As I explored more of the town a sense of community started to grow on me. It had some of the buildings you'd expect in a real town, such as a school, a clinic with beds and changing rooms, a basketball court, a racetrack, shops, houses, and so on.

 A messy changing room gives the sense that this place has been lived in.

Group photos on the far wall. I found it endearing. Even virtual spaces can be imbued with heart.

 Things start to get populated as the regulars come online.

 A strange collection of characters

Cats and dogs and women who look like porcelain dolls seems to be a common motif here

Property is available to rent. There is a fair amount of traffic depending on the time, and being one of the two Korean communities (that I could find), this place almost monopolizes its own niche, presumable making it good for business.

One of the users was generous enough to buy a translator for me, a handy tool in a place where genuine Korean speakers engage in dialogues with native English speakers.

As I lurked in the town center, a couple of Japanese speakers started conversing over voicechat.

Even though there are no professional language teachers here, it's still a good place to practice Korean (for non-Korean speakers) and English (for non-English speakers). It's basically a chatroom with visual, auditory and interactive dimensions.

One could view places such as this as surrogates for a lack of satisfactory offline communities, but with more of the world becoming increasingly digitized it's probably more accurate to view Second Life as a precursor/prototype to what is to come.

ADDENDUM... further reflections

It turns out the girl I've been speaking about is an actual female. I managed to get her to speak on the microphone. She was incredibly shy.

We ended up going on a date which culminated in her showing me to her house. I was a little creeped out by the presence of two infants crawling along the carpet; otherwise her house was pretty cool.

I couldn't help but wonder who this person was in real life. I'd heard cases of popular Second Life players committing suicide - there was one obese mother of two who did such a thing. Questions popped into my mind about the mental health of some of these players. You can never be sure of who's on the other side of the screen, so it's natural to speculate. Wouldn't she be thinking the same things about me? Maybe I'm out of the loop.

I was reminded of Serial Experiments Lain, an anime which examines the interface between reality and a virtual world known as 'The Wired'. Over time The Wired intrudes upon the real world to the point where characters cannot tell one from the other. This of course is happening all the time in our personal lives, such as when being defriended on Facebook is as real as being snubbed in person.

In fact the Internet is the perfect void to which you can project all your demons and fantasies. The internet is something we take for granted, but it has a hold over us that we don't often acknowledge. There's something disturbing about its ability to devour us, and the more you think you have sovereignty whilst using it, perhaps the more deluded you are.

These issues of identity (who are you in real life vs virtual life), community, psychological projection and so on are all interesting areas to explore.